How I Married My Best Friend's Girlfriend

We all went to high school together and were just normal kids. They started dating in grade 10 when we were about 16. As we grew up, he just… didn’t. He turned into a mopey user who never held down a job. His hand was always out for anything offered to him, yet he kept meticulous track of every cigarette he ever gave someone, just in case his dad bought him a pack or something.

When we went off to college, he tagged along in a photography program, rooming with his girlfriend. He blew all of his student loan money on booze, cigarettes, weed, and Magic cards, leaving her to cover food and rent on her own for the year. By mid-second semester, he stopped going to class altogether and eventually dropped out.

After college, the three of us moved back to our hometown and still went out on weekends. He would always get blackout drunk and end up punching street signs, so I started leaving around midnight just to avoid dealing with it. Several times, he followed me home, ranting about how much of a bitch his girlfriend was and how he was going to break up with her because she dared to talk to her friends at parties instead of devoting all her attention to him while he binge-drank.

One time, he followed me home, and I told him I didn’t want to talk about his relationship because I had just found out my mom (I never met my dad) had been given six months to live due to long-standing medical issues. Instead of offering any support, he told me the world didn’t revolve around me and that sometimes I needed to set aside my problems to help a friend. Luckily, my mom’s health improved, and she’s still alive today.

That moment marked the beginning of the end of our friendship. By then, he was also working for me, but he was a terrible employee. There was some drama about that, but it doesn’t really affect this story aside from explaining why I couldn’t just cut him out of my life entirely.

Around this time, he started doing blow with some of his other friends. Sometimes, after inviting us over, he’d tell us to leave 30 minutes later because someone with better drugs needed a place to get high.

By this point, we weren’t working together anymore, but I worked with his girlfriend’s best friend. One day, she was venting about him, and I told her that despite him being my best friend for years, she could do so much better. Apparently, she told his girlfriend what I said, and that was the push she needed to leave him.

I had known her for just as long as him, so I kept hanging out with both of them separately. There was never any funny business between us, and at the time, I was actually trying to turn a friends-with-benefits situation with one of her friends into something more.

By this point, her now-ex had started driving by her house a lot—basically stalking her—with his dad, and he saw my car there a few times. He got really mad and told me I had to choose between him and her.

I thought hard about it and realized that, over the past few years, I’d had more fun and gotten along better with her than I ever had with him. So, I said, “Screw it,” asked her out officially, and now we’ve been together for eight years and married for five.

He went around telling everyone we’d been having an affair the whole time, but I don’t think anyone believed him. Last I heard, he’s still living in his dad’s basement.